Communication Research and Media Coding

M_nus Sunday Adventure Club: A Berlin Heterotopy

Richie Hawtin’s M_nus label are usually wizards when it comes to the creation of a coherent identity for an event or any other type of activity. This is mostly achieved through a good communications concept and brilliant web design. Thus, it came as no surprise that the website for yesterday’s Sunday Adventure Club was rich with signifyers towards the intended identity: A pirate’s bay of minimal techno, with Berlin as its island base and other parts of Europe as free-floating islands in a sea of irrelevant rurality. Globalized local identities at their best.

With this in my head, I was stunned to see the venue mostly undecorated and without obvious connections to the symbolic language of the corresponding website. Instead, the Berlin-identity was back in the driver seat, with its diverse train system rolling right past the crowd, which itself was stuck in a recess between the tracks and an old-Berlin style clay wall. No, this was no island at all. Instead, what I saw and felt was a heterotopy, a venue separated from the regular Berlin, but deeply rooted in its symbolic topos. This was enriched and transformed by the international crowd and the improbability to see a Richie Hawtin set in (almost) full daylight. So, the best communications concept for the creation of an event’s identity is worth nothing after all, if it is not executed all the way through to the venue, where people would couple this identity with social inter(!)action. A great party nonetheless, this event did not convey the coherence I had expected from a brand as successful as M_nus.